THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

In November, Memory and Straw won the prestigious Fiction Book of the Year Prize at the Saltire Society’s Literary Awards. Here we meet protagonist Sebastian, who lives in Manhattan and works in Artificial Intelligence.

Memory and Straw
By Angus Peter Campbell
Published by Luath Press

It started simply as part of my work. Technology has developed so rapidly that it’s difficult to remember we grew up without any of this assistance. My dad used to take me fishing, and the best thing was simply making the rods: gathering fallen bits of branches from the forest, then whittling them down by the stove on the Friday evening.

‘Splice forwards,’ he’d say, holding my hand steady as I cut the knife through the wood. ‘And always go with the grain.’

Hazel was best. It was pliable, yet firm. After a while it moulded into the shape of your hand.

I now know that my ancestors had other means of moving through time and space, and the more I visit there the simpler it becomes. For who would not want to fly across the world on a wisp of straw, and make love to a fairy woman with hair as red as the sunset?

The more I discover, the more I like the precision of their world: to dream of your future husband, you pluck a few ears of corn with the stalk and place them with your right hand under the left side of your pillow. Threshed corn will not do. Exactitude was important. Otherwise, the magic wouldn’t work. If you made a clay corpse it had to be in the image of the person you wanted to harm. You pierced the body exactly where you wanted the ailment to strike. Curses, just like blessings, were specific. Once extracted from their native heath and time they don’t work.

I work in nanotechnology, which is where my drive for precision found its home. There is no room here for approximation. As the old divines would have put it, things are either right or wrong. One binary digit equals the value of zero or one, and so eight bits equal one byte and one thousand and twenty-four bytes equal one kilobyte and so on up to my good friend the petabyte which equals 1,125,899,906,842,624. None of it ever varies or hesitates with doubt. It is perfect music.

Over the past two years I’ve been the lead engineer on masking for the care industry. The franchise is owned by a Japanese company, but they’ve subcontracted the work out to our branch here in New York. It’s a growing industry simply because people get older by the day.

I won’t tire you with the statistics, but the demographics look good. In the next decade alone the number of over eighties is due to quadruple throughout the world, with the biggest market developing in the far east itself. My job is to put a human face on the robots who will care for that generation. As a mark of respect for the great man, we call the central machine Albert.

Despite all our technology, humans cling on to their traditions. Old people especially like the familiar. They like routine, a safe process which keeps death at bay for a while longer. Even though our robots can run every care home far more efficiently that any nurse or carer, the residents still want to see a human face in the morning serving them breakfast, and last thing at night tucking them into bed. So we’ve made our robots human; have developed lifelike masks which have deceived even the young in experiments. If something looks human, it is human.

My line manager Hiroaki Nagano put it straight to me the very first day.

‘We’re doing these guys a favour. It’s dangerous out there in the world for them, so far better they never leave their homes. Most of them don’t want to anyway, and the rest would be better not to. Safe from muggings, assault, robberies, terrorism. They’re old, and will never need to leave their houses again. We’ll provide them with the tireless companion who will meet their every need. A cyborg friend who won’t complain, demand better wages or conditions, speak back or abuse them. A win-win for everyone, Gavin.’

It’s not just an engineering problem. The real challenge is aesthetic. Creating mask-bots which are not only lifelike, but lifelike in a familiar, flawed way. For beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Apart from a few perverts and perfectionists, most of the old people we cater for prefer carers as fragile as themselves. If you really study the human face you’ll discover that it’s perfectly imbalanced. Most folk imagine that the nose is halfway down the face: in fact the eyes are the halfway point. What comforts us is human imperfection. A face is nothing without its history.

---

Memory and Straw by Angus Peter Campbell is out now published by Luath Press priced £12.99. The book won Fiction Book of the Year at the 2017 Saltire Society’s Literary Awards.

Defence lawyer Robbie Munroe muses upon the role of Santa Claus as he juggles court cases at work with festive family life at home. But will he meet the expectations of Tina, his four-year-old daughter?

Extract from Present Tense
By WHS MacIntyre
Published by Sandstone Press

‘Don’t give me any excuses. You promised her,’ my dad punctuated his words with a few short blows of his nose. ‘You promised she’d have that doll for her Christmas,’ he managed to get out before collapsing into a fit of sneezing that prevented me from pointing out that I hadn’t prom­ised anything of the sort. He had.

My few months of fatherhood had taught me that children, like clients, should never be promised anything. Ever. Make a child a promise and you might as well open a vein and get it all down on vellum, because they’d hold you to your word like Flashman holding Tom Brown to a roaring fireplace. I’d had a father-to-daughter chat with Tina about the whole problem in which, leaving the intellectual property aspect to one side, I’d done my best to explain the predicament in which Santa Claus found himself. It had gone fairly well until my dad had spoiled it all by mentioning how he knew Santa personally. Seemingly, they were great pals.

I led the old man to a chair and tried to push him down into it.

‘Firstly, I promised her nothing – you did, and, secondly, sit down and I’ll make you a toddy.’ I hoped mention of the amber nectar might assist in a change of subject. ‘A drop of whisky, hot water, lemon and honey, and your coughing and sneezing will be sorted out in no time.’

‘Get away.’ He shrugged me off. ‘I’ve got a cold. I’m not marinating a chop.’ He pulled out his hanky and blew his nose. ‘Just tell me what you’re going to do about getting Tina that doll that she wants.’ With a final sniff and wipe he stuffed the hanky back into his trouser pocket. ‘Sauntering about like tomorrow will do. I think you’ve forgotten how close to Christmas it is.’

‘Christmas? Really? You’d have thought there’d be decorations in the shops or adverts on the telly to warn me about that kind of thing.’ I took him by the shoulders and this time was successful in pressing him down into a chair. ‘Calm yourself or you’ll start coughing again. It’s going to be all right. Trust me. It said on the news that they’re hoping to have everything agreed between the TV company and the manufacturers any time now. There’ll be plenty of stock available come the New Year.’

‘The New Year!’ The old man launched himself to his feet again. ‘What good is the New Year? What do I say to the bairn on Christmas morning? It’s the only thing she’s asked for.’

‘Listen, dad. It’s Pyxie Girl that’s supposed to be magic, not me. If there’s none available, there’s none available. And anyway, how come it’s all down to me? It was you who promised you’d get it for her. You and Santa…’ I crossed my index and middle fingers and held them up. ‘You’re like that, apparently. Why should it be my problem? I’ve got her my presents already.’

‘Presents?’ He blew a blast into his hanky. ‘Clothes aren’t presents to a four-year-old. Weans want toys at Christmas.’

The conversation came to a shuddering halt when our very own four-year-old came through looking for more kitchen roll because her doll’s cape had ripped mid-flight.

‘Supper, bath and bed for you,’ I said, picking Tina up and holding her in my arms. ‘You’ve got a big day ahead of you helping Gramps get you all packed for going to Disneyland. That’ll be fun, won’t it?’

Tina looked me in the eyes. ‘Can you come too, Dad?’

‘Me? No, I’m too old for Disneyland.’

‘But Grandma’s going and so is Aunt Chloe and they’re old, so why can’t you come?’

I gave her a hug, put her down and hunkered beside her, holding her hands. ‘I’ve got to stay and work, darling. I have to go to court. I’m not allowed to take holidays just now, but I’ll be off for a few days at Christmas. When you get back you can tell me all about Disneyland and we can play with your new toys, and—’

‘Gramps says that he’s asked Santa to bring me Pyxie Girl.’ Tina turned and looked up at my dad all wide-eyed. ‘Didn’t you, Gramps?’ Back to me. ‘Gramps says that he knows Santa and that they’re friends and that Santa always does what Gramps asks him.’ Back to my Dad. ‘Doesn’t he, Gramps?’

‘That’s right, pet,’ my dad stared down at me like he was Father Christmas and I the little helper who’d sold Rudolph to a venison farm. ‘He does.’

---

Present Tense by WHS MacIntyre, the first book in the Best Defence series, is out now published by Sandstone Press priced £8.99.

You can read another extract from the book here on Books from Scotland.

Last Will, the third installment in the Best Defence Series featuring criminal lawyer Robbie Munroe, was published in November 2017.

Consultant radiologist Roger Chisholm was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis aged 27. Since then he’s mountaineered in the Austrian Alps with only one working limb, sailed above the Arctic Circle, walked around Annapurna, worked as a doctor in India, and explored the tribal region of north Pakistan. In this extract we stay closer to home in Glasgow, the city of Roger’s birth, to trace his early life and his developing love of adventure.

Extract from Don’t Look Down: An Adventurous Life With MS
By Roger Chisholm
Published by Scotland Street Press

Made in Scotland

Officially at least, I belong to Glasgow. You wouldn’t have been able to tell that from my accent for the last 50 years, and I haven’t worn a kilt in Chisholm tartan in ages, but “born in Glasgow” is indeed what it says on my passport and birth certificate, even if I am one of that rare breed of Glaswegians who don’t particularly mind if England beat Scotland at football, rugby or indeed anything else. For it was in a Glasgow maternity hospital that my lungs first breathed in air on 21 October 1951, and the Chisholms’ first family home to which they brought me back was a three-bedroomed pebble-dashed semi on Lindsay Road, East Kilbride.

It’s hard to imagine now, but back then East Kilbride – eight miles south-east of Glasgow – was one of the most forward-looking places in Britain. In 1947, it became the first “new town” in Scotland, and the following year the Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory was built there. Although it soon changed its name to the National Engineering Laboratory, it didn’t change its purpose – to be at the cutting edge of British engineering research and development, with a budget overshadowed only by those for similar establishments in the US and the USSR. It was there, my father hoped, where Britain’s second industrial revolution would be forged, where research scientists like him would open up our future as a science superpower. Armed with a hard won first-class degree in engineering that he had taken at the Royal Technical College, Salford while working as an apprentice at Metro Vicks, he moved north to what looked distinctly like the job of his dreams.

At the National Engineering Laboratory, if nowhere else, he found somewhere that implemented his belief that Britain should honour its engineering heritage and build on it in the future. Each of the NEL’s huge research laboratories was named after a British pioneer in the field to which it was devoted. Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, William Rankine, Joseph Whitworth: why weren’t they every bit as famous, my father would have wondered, as, say, Trollope, Wordsworth, Dickens and Austen? I can certainly imagine him making the case. “Look Roger,” I can hear him saying, “they’ve changed our lives so much more. Machine tools, the hydraulic press, thermodynamics, mass production: each one of those four men has revolutionised industry – and yet the way we ignore engineering, you’d be lucky to meet anyone who’s ever heard of them.”

I am, you’ve probably gathered, leaping ahead of myself, because my Dad almost certainly wasn’t saying this to his swaddled new-born son held in his wife’s arms in the back seat as he drove from the maternity hospital to our East Kilbride home. It was only in my teens when he started putting pressure on me to study engineering at university. Apart from the job, there were other important reasons my parents had looked forward to coming to Scotland. I’ve already mentioned their love of climbing and walking, but my father also adored sailing. He may have failed to pass on his passion for engineering to me, but there’s one transference that did work: I’ve always been happiest messing around on boats. Indeed, it’s been the one consistent golden thread in my life. Whatever else has disappointed me in life, that love of being on a boat surging through water with the bow wave singing, never has.

Where did that start? In our family album, there’s a photo of me standing on the bow of a yacht, holding onto the shrouds (the wire ropes holding up the mast), and looking straight ahead, my three-year-old head with its back to the camera. It’s 1954, we’re on the Clyde, a slight breeze is coming over the beam and gently filling the heavy tan-coloured canvas sails. If I were Proust, I’d be able to give you five pages about that boy and that moment, the way it now seems so timeless and dreamlike, a colour shot from a usually monochrome decade. It might be something to do with the fact that you can’t see my face, but you can see where we’re heading. There’s a gentle wind, a calm sea, clouds clearing or gathering (clearing, I think) in the distance at the head of the loch. This boy, I think, as I look at the picture, knows that he’s found something he’s always going to love: holding onto a rope, and starting out on an adventure.

---

Don’t Look Down: An Adventurous Life With MS by Roger Chisholm is out now published by Scotland Street Press.

Slum Virgin tells the larger-than-life story of Cleopatra, a transvestite who, living in  Buenos Aires, renounces prostitution after the Virgin Mary appears before her. Following the divine messages she receives, Cleo takes charge of the shantytown she lives in, transforming it into a tiny utopia.

Extract from Slum Virgin
By Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Translated by Frances Riddle
Published by Charco Press

Atoms, molecules whipped into a frenzy by random chance, that’s all life is. This was the kind of profound insight that filled my head out there on the island in the Delta, half-naked and without any of my things, not even a computer, just a little bit of cash and the credit cards I couldn’t use until we left Argentina. My thoughts were rotten: sticks, beer bottles, lily pads, used condoms, crumbling docks and headless dolls, a collage of losses discarded by the tide. I felt like a castaway who’d barely survived a shipwreck. Although I’ve learnt by now that no one ever really survives a shipwreck. The ones who drown end up dead and the ones who are saved spend the rest of their lives drowning.

We stayed in the town of Tigre on the Paraná Delta the whole winter, engulfed by the fog from the river that owed endlessly past. We didn’t speak much. For me, everything was underscored by pain, suffused with it. I floated through daily life, alien to everything that sustained me: the smells of the kitchen and the heat of the wood-burning stove. Cleopatra exercised all her talents under the shadow of the Virgin, ignoring my dazed indifference to life and death, to the whims of deranged molecules that lay waste to worlds and children in the course of their adventures. I lived folded in on myself in the foetal position, just like the creature growing inside of me and in spite of me: my womb was alive with a daughter who continued to grow even though I was a cemetery of dead loved ones. I felt like a stone: an aberration, a state of matter, a rock imbued with the knowledge that it was going to be crushed and reconfigured and transformed into something else. And this knowledge hurt. I haven’t done any scientific research on the topic, but surely you never get two rocks that are exactly alike. Or maybe you do – who the hell could ever compare all the rocks of all time? And I don’t know that it would lessen the pain for this rock to know that maybe, once, there had been another identical rock somewhere in the expanses of time, one that doesn’t even exist any more. All that exists are the movements of molecules, the fundamental restlessness of the elements. I don’t give a damn whether there’s ever been or never been another aberration identical to me or to Kevin. Nature doesn’t conform to the rules of mass production: ‘It’s not an assembly line, the products aren’t all the same, because there’s God,’ said Cleopatra. ‘There is no God,’ I told her sometimes, the few times I ever spoke, when she came in with the analgesic of her exuberant and optimistic imagination…

---

Slum Virgin by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is out now published by Charco Press priced £9.99.

We go behind-the-scenes of Glasgow’s oldest Indian restaurant, the Koh-I-Noor, to explore the dedication and vision of the Tahir family. We also include a recipe – no, not for the full bhoona – but for delicious Chicken Tikka which originates from the Punjab region.

Extract from The Full Bhoona: History, Memories and Recipes from The Koh-I-Noor 
By Amy Glasgow with Waseem Tahir
Published by Ringwood

From the Introduction

The phrase ‘the full bhoona’ has many connotations across Scotland, developed over the years to mean giving it everything, putting in as much as possible, so you wouldn’t be too surprised if you overheard a Glaswegian calling out with pride: ‘Ah gie’d it the full bhoona, by the way!’

It’s a fitting interpretation, given that the origin of the phrase stems from a dish that appeared on the first menu of the Koh-I-Noor, a restaurant that was opened due to the hard work and determination of one family—you could say they gave it everything, they gave it ‘the full bhoona.’

When they put a dish on the menu called the ‘Full Bhoona’—a large lamb bhoona served with a sizeable side salad—it’s unlikely they knew then how famous that saying would become. Now the oldest curry house in Glasgow, the Koh-I-Noor is over fifty years old. It has been a labour of love for the Tahir family, bringing traditional Indian and Punjabi cuisine to the hearts—and stomachs—of Glasgow, Scotland, and beyond.

The much-loved restaurant situated on North Street today is very different from where it all began. The humble beginnings of this renowned curry house stretch back to 1956, when current owner Waseem Tahir’s grandfather, Qadir Baqash, came to Glasgow from Pakistan. In 1960, Qadir was joined by his son Ghalum Rasul Tahir and in 1964 they opened the Koh-I-Noor restaurant in Gibson Street with only six tables.
Since then, the family has endured several trials and successes to build the curry house Glaswegians know and love today. Over the past five decades it has become a favourite with locals, restaurant critics and celebrities alike.

From ‘Memories from the Dining Room’

‘As I approached by 18th birthday my best friend and I were invited for a few beers in the Beer Bar at Glasgow University Students Union and an Indian curry by my friend’s elder brother and his friend, both second year students. At this time, students existed on student grants—not loans. But, like students today, the grants never lasted long. Consequently, the enterprising pair that my newfound friends were would invite curry “virgins” for beer then a kofta vindaloo on the premise that the newbies would be unable to handle such a hot dish and relinquish it to the ever-hungry older pair. This was the first time that I would enter the Koh-I-Noor but certainly not the last. I am proud to say that my friend and I survived the ordeal of this, the hottest curry available at the time, and indeed it became a favourite.

Both father [Rasul] and son [Waseem] have always been generous in giving advice on making curries but never revealing the marinade for their lamb. There were a few times also when they gave me and other friends milk and sugar to take home, before the shops seemed to be open all the time.

But what else keeps them going? Why are they such a good restaurant? The food, obviously, but what about location? In Gibson Street when we were students, excellent, but we have left uni and live elsewhere; the service, the staff in general, ambience? The price? A meal no longer costs what it did when we were students, but then, we get paid more.

My friends and I had many good times and meals there after a few beers and discussing how to put the worlds to right. We took girlfriends who became wives and then our children who now regularly enjoy their meals there with their children. When I sit in the Koh-I-Noor, I find it hard to believe that for nearly 50 years Rasul and now Waseem have provided me with excellent food and a place to share good times with my friends.’ – George Ibell, loyal customer

From ‘Recipes from the Kitchen’

Chicken Tikka

Originating in the Punjab region, chicken tikka is traditionally made using small pieces of boneless chicken marinated in yoghurt and spices. This recipe uses succulent chicken breast and traditional flavours to create a delicious, authentic starter.

Ingredients:

450 g of chicken breast, chopped into chunks    
100 ml of lemon juice
1 tbsp of salt
2 tsp of of chilli powder
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tbsp of fresh ginger, grated
½ tsp of cumin
4 tbsp of yoghurt
2 tbsp of oil

Method:

1. Preheat the grill to its highest setting.
2. Combine all the ingredients above, minus the chicken, in a large mixing bowl until you have a smooth, orange-yellow marinade.
3. Add the chicken to the marinade and leave for a minimum of two hours—can be made the day before and left to marinate overnight.
4. Thread the marinated chicken pieces onto skewers and place onto a grill tray.
5. Grill for ten minutes, turning regularly, until cooked through and serve hot with raita and flatbreads.

---

The Full Bhoona by Amy Glasgow with Waseem Tahir is out now published by Ringwood priced £17.99.

We showcase some of the illustrations by Chris Riddell in I Killed Father Christmas, by Anthony McGowan, which tells the tale of Jo-Jo who kills Father Christmas by being greedy and asking for too many expensive presents. To make amends, Jo-Jo decides that he must become Father Christmas!

An Artwork Gallery
From I Killed Father Christmas
By Anthony McGowan with illustrations by Chris Riddell
Published by Barrington Stoke

 

---

I Killed Father Christmas by Anthony McGowan, with illustrations by Chris Riddell, is out now published by Barrington Stoke priced £6.99.

In Die, My Love, recently longlisted in the TLS-sponsored Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, a woman battles her demons in a forgotten patch of French countryside. As restriction and repression builds within the woman, pushing her to breaking point, the narrative explores when and how violent a form this takes.

Die, My Love
By Ariana Harwicz
Translated by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff
Published by Charco Press

My last memory of the pregnancy is from Christmas. My husband’s whole family had come to stay from towns even more in the middle of nowhere than this one. My stomach was churning, the baby was moving at an abnormal speed, and people had their fingers crossed hoping they wouldn’t have to rush off to hospital with me and leave their turkey- and-apple dinner un finished. I was standing in the living room in front of the fire. I can’t remember having done anything in particular to reveal how desperate I was feeling. For some time, I’d been containing everything, or so I thought, in a swaying motion that was subtle though intensifying, when, suddenly, I was offered a seat and something cool to drink. Since when did sitting down and having some water get rid of the desire to die? Thanks, Grandma. I’m fine though. But they sat me down and brought me the glass of cool water anyway. These people are going to make me lose it. I wish I had Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon for neighbours; then my son could grow up and develop intellectually by learning that there’s more to the world I brought him into than opening old skylights you can’t see out of anyway. As soon as all the others had escaped to their rooms to digest their meals, I heard my father-in-law cutting the grass beneath the snow with his new green tractor and thought that if I could lynch my whole family to be alone for one minute with Glenn Gould, I’d do it. Later on I saw him sitting at his desk, going over last month’s supermarket receipts. He read the price of each product and then checked the total with a calculator. By the time he’d finished recording the sums in his log of monthly expenses, the desk lamp was no longer giving off enough light. We ate dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he’s exceptional. After that, he cleaned his dentures and went to bed. And this is a day lived? This is a human being living a day of his life? In his bedroom there’s a rifle; on his night table, a few cartridges. I won’t be killed in my own bed, he says. If I hear noises, I’ll load my gun and go downstairs. And if there’s trouble, I’ll fire. Straight at the feet, he’d say, inhaling the saliva that was always caught in his throat. My mother-in-law watched me all day long, worrying. She didn’t know what else to do when she knocked on my door at dawn and entered timidly with another glass of water and a green-and-white pill. Thanks, I said, and as soon as she left I tossed it into the fire. I don’t like side effects. I don’t like antidepression. The only thing I could do at times like this was hug my womb and wait. The baby was asleep in there, wrapped up in my guts, foreign to me. He wasn’t much help back then either. As soon as the ritual of the raised glasses and well-wishing was over, I tried to escape my husband’s gaze. He was already throwing darts at the bull’s eye on the terrace. Every time he missed a shot he’d say, Arghh! I walked through the living room, which was strewn with wrapping paper, ribbons and other decorations, to the pile of clothes for the unborn child, but I didn’t put anything away. Instead I went out into the woods, exhausted from the contractions. When I think back now, the pain returns, leaping onto me like a dog. The questions asked that Christmas perforated me with more force than hunters’ bullets. Have you been looking for work? Do you think you’ll send the kid to a nursery? Are you paying your taxes? And your health insurance? Do you need any help? I’m finally here. I only ever come down to the woods at night when it’s an emergency.

---

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz is out now published by Charco Press priced £9.99.

The book has recently been longlisted for the Republic of Conciousness Prize for Small Presses which is sponsored by the TLS.

The Nordic countries have a veritable smörgåsbord of relationships with the European Union, from in, to out, to somewhere in-between. So, what does that mean for Scotland? Enriching debate about Scotland’s post-Brexit future, Lesley Riddoch and Eberhard Bort, with a little help from their Nordic friends, examine key questions in this informative book.

ScotBookFlood: Celebrating Scottish-Nordic Literary Links for Book Week Scotland

With Book Week Scotland 2017 kicking off on Monday 27 November, we’re delighted to announce ScotBookFlood. Inspired by the unique tradition of book gifting in Iceland, Jólabókaflóð (which translates roughly as ‘Christmas book flood’), ScotBookFlood will celebrate Scottish-Nordic/Icelandic literary links and encourage thoughtful book gifting for loved ones in the run-up to Christmas.

This digital campaign will be delivered throughout Book Week Scotland (from Monday 27 November to Sunday 3 December) via social media and the Books from Scotland website. Books from Scotland, the sister website to Publishing Scotland, will feature a special ScotBookFlood Issue launching on Monday 27 December.

From Monday 27 November to Sunday 3 December we invite you to get involved in our conversation by using the hashtags #ScotBookFlood, #BookWeekScotland, and tweeting @scottishbooks. We’d love you to tell us what Scottish books you’ll be gifting to loved ones, or what books from Scotland you plan to read over the festive period.

Just as Jólabókaflóð is at the centre of Iceland’s annual festivities, let’s make ScotBookFlood a fun celebration of the wealth of wonderful authors and publishers in Scotland today. We wish you a very merry ScotBookFlood full of northern (literary) lights!

Tying into our ScotBookFlood Issue for Book Week Scotland, we’re delighted to feature this exclusive extract from Kirsty Logan’s forthcoming novel The Gloaming. A tale of love and grief, and the gap between fairy tales and real life, The Gloaming is set on a remote island that slowly turns its inhabitants to stone. In this extract we meet the enigmatic Signe…

Extract from The Gloaming
Forthcoming from Harvill Secker
By Kirsty Logan

Signe was alone in the studio, running through rehearsals for a role she already knew by heart: Odile, the wicked black-costumed witch of Swan Lake, the contrast to the good white-costumed Odette. She’d been playing the dual role for three months in this particular production; there was another month to go. It was hard not to measure time in months now. Ever since she’d met Peter – his knuckles big and knotted like they were carved from wood, his shoulders curving round her like the walls of a house. She knew she wanted to make new life with him.

Signe brought her foot up to the barre and bent to touch her raised toe, feeling the pull in her inner thigh, in her obliques, through each finger as she stretched – and there, suddenly, another pull where there shouldn’t be one. A flutter, an insect-wing flicker deep inside her. She straightened and stretched her arms above her head until it went away.

Love had already begun to fill her out. A ballet dancer’s clothing is tiny and tight, but the practical thinness of her figure makes the skimpiness elegant, classic, rather than sultry. In the streets, in her coat and ankle boots, Signe was still a slim woman. But at the barre she was fleshly, an embarrassment of curves. Her shiny black leotard seemed more to oil her body than cover it.

After her performance the night before, she’d run straight from the stage to a theatre two streets over to see Peter fight. They’d spent every night that week with his bent and swollen hands resting in a salad bowl of ice, his body hunched over the kitchen table. His knuckles were salted white with scars.

‘There are two ways out of a life like this,’ Peter had said. His voice was thickened and drowsy, treacle-slow. Signe turned from the sink where she was tipping more ice into a cloth. ‘One way is to fail. The other is to die.’

Signe brought him a new bowl of ice and lightly kissed his forehead and slid her heavying body onto his lap. She distracted him with her love and herself – but she knew that he was right.

Most dancers, if they’re lucky, will perform as prima ballerina throughout their 20s. Then, when their 30s roll around, they can no longer play the princess or the young lover. There are still plenty of good roles to play – some may argue that these roles are better. The psychotic queen in Alice in Wonderland, the wicked godmother in Sleeping Beauty, the grotesque fortune-telling witch in La Sylphide. By the time the dancer is in her late 30s, even mothers and witches are too young, and the only choice left is to train others. That’s assuming you’ve hung in there that long: it’s possible you’d have snapped your achilles tendon, dislocated your knees during a spin, or had a hip replacement after too many leg extensions. But whenever you go, it’s rare that anyone would notice you were gone. As soon as you stop dancing, there’s another dancer already prepped to step into your place. She’d snatch the shoes off your feet, too, if you hadn’t already danced them to rags.

Signe had soaked Peter’s hands, and the next day he’d got up again and gone to the gym and prepared for that night’s fight. He was hurting, but that wasn’t enough reason to stop. Signe watched from the crowd as he threw a punch, blinking as it landed. According to the rules of boxing, a boxer cannot hit a man when he’s down. But when he is still on his feet, half-senseless, reeling, both eyes blood-blind – then you can and should hit him as hard as you can to bring him down. Hit hard and you’re a champion; show mercy and you’re nothing but a fool. And so down he goes, and out comes another boxer. Another strong, ignorant, innocent boy. But why blame the gloved opponent or the cheering crowd? We don’t blame a ballet’s audience for the dancers’ bleeding feet.

There was a time that Signe had loved to watch Peter work. He had nothing except his own body, and still the crowd wanted it, and he happily gave it away. The bell rang, and Signe clambered into the ring, her small nervous hands slippery on the ropes. She was still wearing her swan costume, the white leotard patched with nervous sweat. A scatter of crumpled white feathers from her tutu floated across the heads of the crowd, and surely they must be thinking that her appearance was a planned – though melodramatic – part of the show.

Peter looked up at her, and it took a full three seconds for recognition to spark in his eyes.

‘You’re not here,’ he said, but he reached for her anyway.

‘Peter,’ said Signe. ‘Peter.’

There was a time that Peter had nothing except his own body. But didn’t he have something else, now? Wasn’t she something? His slick, hot forehead pressed to her smooth, cool one. He was as strong as stone. He would never break. The roar of the crowd fell away. They both watched as a dark glob of blood spatted onto the diamond of floor between their feet. Peter looked up at her in surprise, one nostril ringed red.

‘But he didn’t get a head hit,’ said Peter. ‘He didn’t…’

The problem is not the impact of the fist and the face. The problem is that a punch makes the head snap back and then forward, causing the brain to thud repeatedly against the hard inside of the skull. It’s a concussive blow. A car crash, over and over. It’s common for two boxers to bump heads while sparring. But just because something is common, that doesn’t mean it’s not devastating. The worst collision is when the soft circle near one man’s temple collides with the tough band on the top of the head. It’s not just about how sturdy a man is, not if the softest part of you hits the hardest part of someone else. Detached retinas, blood clots, cauliflower ears, broken thumbs, obstructed nostrils. And that’s just the damage you can see. Signe had watched as Peter’s other nostril darkened, a trickle of blood on his top lip.

Now, standing at the barre in the silent white studio, she remembered that blood. She thought of her suddenly too-tight clothes, the fluttering low in her belly, and the world shifted. That falling drop of blood – it was a sign. It was a warning.

 

That night, Signe was ready for the pinnacle of her performance: to whip herself around 32 times on the same standing leg, using the force of her other leg to propel her around, the whole thing done on the tip of one toe.

But she didn’t get that far. First came a leap. She dropped her body, ready. Her feet tensed. Her calves, her thighs. Her body poised to spring – and she let it go.

An audible bang, like a stone thrown to the ground.

Pain exploded in her right ankle.

She fell to her knees, too shocked to cry out. She felt like she’d been kicked with a dozen booted feet all at once, like she’d been shot – not that she knew what either felt like, but they couldn’t be much worse than this. The music carried on, but Signe did not.

 

Later that night in her hospital bed, to explain why she’d refused sedatives, to explain why she kept saying that the days of dancing and the boxing were over, to explain why she was crying with happiness when she should be crying with pain, she told the doctor and Peter and anyone else who would listen that she was pregnant, she was pregnant, a baby was coming, and now that she had this life she did not need any other.

---

The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan will be published in April 2018 by Harvill Secker. If you enjoyed this extract then you might like this exclusive piece by Kirsty, ‘Solitude, Swimming and Sheep: Ten Easy Steps For a Month-Long Writing Residency in Iceland’, on Books from Scotland, as part of our ScotBookFlood Issue for Book Week Scotland.

Enjoying our ScotBookFlood Issue and want to find out more? This specially curated Pinterest board presents some top titles from non-fiction to fiction for adults, young adults, and children for furthering your Scottish-Nordic reading.

We speak to best-selling author Matt Haig about Father Christmas and Me, the third book in his highly successful Christmas series, published by Canongate Books. In Father Christmas And Me we meet unconventional heroine Amelia again, as she swaps Victorian London for new adventures in Elfhelm in the frozen north.

Father Christmas and Me is your third book in your festive series published by Canongate Books. What initially inspired you to write a children’s book about Christmas?

I had just written Reasons to Stay Alive and wanted to write about the opposite of depression. So when my son Lucas asked me what Father Christmas was like as a child, I thought a Santa origin story would be just that.

The books in the series all feature compelling young characters who are simultaneously very ordinary – Nikolas lives in poverty in rural Finland while Amelia is a chimney sweep in London – and extraordinary. How did these characters come to you?

I thought it would be a good idea to give Father Christmas – Nikolas – a tragic childhood, to give him a reason WHY he wants to do what he later does. And Amelia also. I wanted to make the happiness that comes to them later to feel earned, for them to have found the light in the darkness.

In Father Christmas and Me we meet Amelia, the heroine from the second book The Girl Who Saved Christmas, again. Can you tell us a little about her new adventures?

Most of this book is set in Elfhelm, not Victorian London. So it is about her being a fish-out-of water among the elves, about how hard it is to fit in at her new school, and what series of events occurs after she crashes a sleigh.

Did you look to any particular stories or folklore while writing the books?

Not specifically. I drew a little bit from Scandinavian folklore. I have some Norwegian family so that helps.

All three books are accompanied by enchanting illustrations by Chris Mould. How did this collaboration come about and can you give us some insight into how the process worked? 

Canongate gave me a list of potential illustrators and Chris’s work stood out as the most fitting – fairytale classic but with a dose of humour – so we went with him. And it was an amazing choice.

What is your favourite thing about Christmas? 

The collective sense of anticipation on Christmas Eve.

After publication of Father Christmas and Me what is next for you?

More writing for boring old grown ups.

---

Father Christmas and Me, the third book in Haig’s bestselling Christmas series, is out now published by Canongate Books priced £12.99.

This interview also appears in the Autumn/Winter New Books Scotland publication for 2017 produced in partnership by Publishing Scotland with Creative Scotland.

In this candid article Kirsty Logan, acclaimed author of books including The Gracekeepers and forthcoming The Gloaming, recalls swapping Scotland for Iceland during a month-long writing residency in rural Iceland.

Solitude, Swimming and Sheep: Ten Easy Steps For a Month-Long Writing Residency in Iceland
By Kirsty Logan

Step 1. Arrive at Keflavík airport late at night. Be driven an hour through the darkness to a small town called Laugarvatn by a Russian man taxi driver who used to be a competitive handball player, and is horrified that you’ve never heard of handball, and so tries to show you YouTube videos of him playing handball on a laptop propped on the dashboard (all while driving). Miraculously don’t die.

Step 2: Get settled in to the cabin and studio at Gullkistan, the artist residency (the name comes from a legend about a chest of gold hidden on Hekla, the active volcano visible from the front window). On the first morning, be woken by a herd of dozens of horses galloping along the main road. After the horses pass, there is utter silence. Make strong coffee, watch the sun rise over the lake, then get to work.

Step 3: Meet Alda and Kristveig, who run Gullkistan, as well as the other artists: Gab the Australian puppeteer, John the American sculptor, Lucie the Canadian choreographer, and Aoi the Japanese painter.

Step 4: Go with Gab and John to the local outdoor swimming pool, which is warm even though it’s September because the water is from the hot spring-heated lake. Swim 50 laps a day, then pop into the steam room and three hot tubs (all heated by the hot springs) where you learn about mushrooms from Gab (it turns out she’s into mycology as well as puppetry). Discover that swimming outside during a storm is one of the best and scariest and most freeing things in the world.

Step 5: Write obsessively into the night, alone in the darkened studio, and then be so freaked out by your own creepy stories that you have to run (not walk) the ten feet between the studio and the cabin, lit by the wavering light of your phone torch. Feel so haunted by your own stories that you triple-check the front door is locked, though you know the likelihood of an axe-wielding murderer descending on your little cabin in Laugarvatn is basically zero.

Step 6: Go on a road trip with Gab and John to visit the boiling-water eruption at Geysir, the waterfall at Gullfoss, and a sudden black-sand beach that doesn’t seem to have a name. Among endless miles of natural beauty, discover an abandoned bin lorry, which Gab climbs to look inside – she claims that it doesn’t contain zombies, but you don’t follow her to check.

Step 7: Attend rettir, the annual sheep-sorting, where the sheep are gathered in from the hills where they graze together all summer so that the farmers can take them inside for the winter (in Iceland, winter is very cold indeed, even if you have a natural woolly jumper). Afterwards go to the tomato farm to consume more freshly made all-you-can-eat tomato soup than you thought possible.

Step 8: Go for long after-lunch walks while listening to horror podcasts. As Laugarvatn consists solely of some houses, a school, two shops and a leisure centre hugging the main road that runs all the way around the edge of Iceland, the one road means only two ways to walk: right or left. You usually choose left as it goes past one field with a horse and one with some cows (all the other fields are empty). Walk for an hour and pass only two farmhouses, then finally turn back without getting in sight of the next town. Add a frame narrative to your story-collection-in-progress about a writer on a remote residency in Iceland who slowly loses her mind when she finds that the people in the town begin to disappear so that she is the only one left. Hope that it will remain fiction.

Step 9: Answer the ringing phone at midnight; it’s Kristveig, telling you to quickly go outside as the northern lights have decided to visit. Grab all the artists you can find and your duvets (even in September, Iceland at night is very cold) and sit out on the grass, watching the unearthly green-pink-purple lights flit and throb across the sky for hours.

Step 10: Over the course of a month manage to lose your mind and then find it again, climb volcanoes and swim in hot springs, write stories weirder and darker and more magical than you could ever have come up with at home, and let Iceland seep into your blood and bones in a way that you know you will never manage to put into words, although you know you will never stop trying.

---

The stories Kirsty wrote in Iceland will be included in the collection The Night Tender. Excerpts from it are upcoming in F(r)iction, Banshee Lit, The Puritan, and on BBC Radio 3.

All photographs in this article are by Kirsty Logan.

We’re also delighted to present a preview of The Gloaming, the forthcoming novel from Kirsty Logan, here on Books from Scotland. A tale of love and grief, and the gap between fairy tales and real life, The Gloaming is set on a remote island that slowly turns its inhabitants to stone.

Mapping the many parallels between Edinburgh and Reykjavik as literary cities with prestigious UNESCO heritage, this article by Rebecca Raeburn at Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust, traces how unique landscapes and cultural traditions shape both capital cities today.

Edinburgh and Reykjavik: A Tale of Two Cities of Literature

Nestled in the very hearts of Scotland and Iceland, you will find two of the world’s Cities of Literature: Edinburgh and Reykjavik. Edinburgh became the first City of Literature under UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network in 2004, with Reykjavik following suit seven years later. Both cities are steeped in history and surrounded by remarkable landscapes, and as the capitals of their respective countries, they have been home to some of the world’s best-loved authors and stories. Writers such as Sir Walter Scott, J.K. Rowling, Gunnar Gunnarsson and Arnaldur Indriðason, have sprung from the beds of these cities, playing their own part in creating lasting legacies.

Kristín Viðarsdóttir from Reyjkavik City of Literature spoke about the literary connections between our two cities:

‘Our literatures have crossed paths through the ages as have our people and our languages. We can trace our connection to the very settlement of Iceland, as many of our ancestors came here from the British Isles. One of them was Audur the Deep-Minded, who lived in Scotland before settling here.  She was the only Viking woman known to have led an independent expedition to Iceland. This connection continues: Walter Scott translated Eyrbyggja Saga in 1814, writer Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson translated Robert Burns’  ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ in 2014 – just two examples out of many.’

Like Edinburgh, Reykjavik boasts an outstanding literary history, enriched by its invaluable heritage of ancient medieval literature, particularly the Sagas written from the 13th century onwards, including texts such as the Book of Icelanders, Kings’ Sagas and the Poetic Edda. These texts, like the Bannatyne Manuscript compiled in Edinburgh in the 16th century, are the foundations upon which both cities have built their literary traditions.

The literary heritage of both Edinburgh and Reykjavik plays a central role within their modern urban landscape to this day, as contemporary writers, poets, and festivals continue to bring them vitality and identity. Like Edinburgh, Reykjavik has its own literary festival, the biannual Reykjavik International Literature Festival, which attracts numerous acclaimed authors from around the world, with past guests including Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Roddy Doyle, Kurt Vonnegut and A.S. Byatt.

In speaking about the exchange of writers from Reykjavik and Edinburgh during both festivals, Kristín Viðarsdóttir wrote:

‘Two of our best known authors, Sjón and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, are among recent guests in Edinburgh, and Reykjavík has had the same fortune, as we have welcomed writers such as Ian Rankin and Edinburgh Makar Christine De Luca to our literary city – Christine De Luca was a featured author at the 2017 International Literary Festival this fall. We look forward to many more visits from writers from our sister City of Literature, and continued literary crossings in the future.’

Perhaps one of the most striking similarities between Edinburgh and Reykjavik is the collective spirit of the country’s passion for literature; the way in which it reaches the everyday resident. Every year in the months leading up to Christmas, a flurry of Icelandic books are published in what is called the jólabokaflód – translated as the ‘Book Flood Before Christmas.’ This is just one example of the way in which the people of Reykjavik dedicate themselves to the promotion of literature, specifically new literature, with book readings, events in cafes, bars, libraries and bookshops.

It is a city too where its very streets come alive with literature, especially in the commemoration of its past and present authors. The statue of Reykjavik poet Tómas Gudmundsson is portrayed sitting on a bench in Reykjavik’s Hljómskálagarður Park, reminiscent of Edinburgh’s statue of poet Robert Fergusson, who is depicted walking down the Royal Mile with book in hand, very much a part of today’s society. This sentiment is championed in both cities, and has led to the creation of literary inspired neighbourhoods like Nordurmýri and Neighbourhood of the Gods, the House of Halldor Laxness – a museum dedicated to the writer’s memory – as well as bookshops, publishers, libraries and other literary attractions in Reykjavik.

Edinburgh and Reykjavik are known around the world for many things, but we believe that literature strengthens them both as an undeniably important part of their histories and their futures. Our Creative Cities Network connects cities all over the world in their work towards a common objective: to foster international cooperation with and between cities committed to investing in creativity as a driver for sustainable urban development, social inclusion and cultural vibrancy.

You can find out more about the stories behind each City of Literature on both Edinburgh and Reykjavik’s City of Literature websites, or you can follow them on Twitter @EdinCityofLit and @RvkCityofLit.

This article is by Rebecca Raeburn, Communications Assistant at Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust.

This recipe from the team at the Mountain Cafe in Aviemore, for Finnish mulled wine, is guaranteed to delight your tastebuds. At Books from Scotland HQ we’re looking forward to drinking this in the run-up to Christmas, wrapped up under cosy blankets, while reading a really good book.

In the early days of the Mountain Cafe we had a lady from Finland as part of our team. Anne introduced me to many fantastic Scandinavian treats. Her Glogi (Finnish mulled wine) was the best, and our recipe has been based on hers ever since. Anne’s top tip was to use plenty blackcurrant juice instead of lots of sugar and I think it gives a lovely natural sweetness. This does make it very easy to drink – you have been warned!

Ingredients (makes about 1 litre)

750ml red wine (not super expensive, just a decent drop)

100ml orange juice

100ml diluting Ribena

70ml brandy

100g vanilla sugar

2 whole cloves

2 star anise

2 cardamom pods

1 cinnamon stick

Place everything in a heavy-bottomed pan and bring to the boil for 10 to 15 minutes. Reduce to a gentle simmer for 30 minutes to an hour. Taste and add extra brandy, sugar or orange juice as you like.

---

From The Mountain Cafe Cookbook: A Kiwi In The Cairngorms by Kirsten Gilmour out now published by Kitchen Press Ltd priced £20.

The Passion of Harry Bingo by journalist Peter Ross, recently published by Sandstone Press, puts Scotland’s diverse multitude of stories under the spotlight. Our monthly columnist David Robinson finds himself immersed in the interests, activities, and passions of people and places, and finds it an entertaining and essential read.

Once upon a time, when Scottish newspapers made money, they covered stories they can’t afford to do now. Back then, the courts had their reporters and so did the council, the crime beat was covered, and there were experts in all the fields that mattered. And when news came bursting out of the blue, the way the biggest stories always do, there were enough reporters to cover that too, to be the equivalent of  hurricane-chasers, tracking trauma and tragedy across Scotland in 100 wpm Pitman.

Usually, though, Peter Ross’s job wasn’t about news. Instead, he would be out of the office ferreting out features about the offbeat, the odd, the different and the colourful. Often, the further off the beaten track he went, the easier such stories were to spot. Provincial Scotland was full of them. ‘There are,’ as he pointed out in the first sentence of his first book, Daunderlust (Sandstone, 2014) ‘more things in Irvine and Perth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’

His latest book, The Passion of Harry Bingo (Sandstone, £8.99) is just out. Like Daunderlust, it consists largely of features that have appeared elsewhere – in most cases, in the pages of Scotland on Sunday. And if you’re one of those people who believe that any such collection is bound to be nothing more than reheated cabbage, let me give you two reasons why it isn’t. First, the quality of Ross’s journalism: this isn’t cabbage. Secondly, just look at its sheer range. Where else can you find someone writing, with wit and insight and empathy, about a drag queens’ ball and the last night of Ramadan, about a man who tries to prevent people drowning in the Clyde and a former junkie in a residential rehab centre? As it happens, all of those are Glasgow stories, so they should be relatively easier to find. But – serious question – where? Who else is writing them?

The big news stories will always reach us, and they’ll reach us quicker than ever now that everyone has a smartphone, so we’ll always hear about the police helicopter crashing onto the Clutha Vaults or about the trial of serial killer Peter Tobin. But when the band Esperenza, who were playing on the night that the helicopter crashed onto the pub roof, play a gig in East Kilbride dedicated to the memory of a fan who was killed that night, who will follow the band both there and at their first gig after the tragedy and find out how they and their fans are coping? When the women at St Patrick’s, Anderston, get the church ready for its reopening a year after the body of Tobin’s last victim, Angelica Kluk, was found beneath its floorboards, isn’t it right that there’s should be someone there, taking time to record how a community prepares to start again, to believe once more in the possibility of goodness?

Both those stories appear in Ross’s new collection. Like most of the rest in it, they serve to highlight just how much will be lost if Scotland ever becomes denuded of what little long-form journalism it already has. News stories give us the basics of a story, but their often clunky attempts at objectivity  in covering the who, what, why when and how of a story invariably fall short when it comes to explaining what life felt like for the people who were caught up in it. For that, you need someone  who can write a story so well that it stitches itself into the readers’ imagination. Someone, in short, like Peter Ross.

In 2015, for example, he wrote a long feature for the Guardian about the tragedy ten years previously in which five members of the MacPherson family were drowned as they drove across the causeway between South Uist and Benbecula. He tells the story straight, sensitively and well. It ends with him mentioning how the man now living in the house the family evacuated as the storm approached, was digging in its garden recently when he came across a toy car, buried about a foot down in the topsoil. It used to belong to the young boy killed in the storm. The man’s own young son asked him where the toy had come from. He didn’t know what to say.

That detail, some might think, doesn’t add anything to a story about unbearable loss. To me it does: it fleshes out what ‘unbearable’ means. It makes me think. It stops the story being something I can ignore, background news I can mentally shut out.

What makes the difference is empathy. Without empathy, Ross probably wouldn’t have got that line about the boy’s toy buried in the soil shifted by the storm that killed him. But the point about empathy is that it shouldn’t only be there for tragedy. It should be there for joy and celebration – both of which figure even more prominently in this collection – too.

Empathy isn’t, Ross admits in the introduction, the first quality that leaps to most people’s minds when they think of journalists. But without it, the stories in The Passion of Harry Bingo could never have been written, not least the title story about a nonagenarian Partick Thistle supporter which opens out into a far wider-ranging study of football fandom in the lower divisions. Empathy also permeates his story about spending a night in Midlothian with the Naked Rambler (fully-clothed, both of them), or about the ostentatiously-decorated Christmas Houses of Port Glasgow. If you think the former is wildly irrational, and the latter just plain naff, prepare to have your mind changed.

In the foreword, Val McDermid points out that Ross’s book is ‘a route map to the strange, bizarre and the wonderful that exists out there on the edges of the everyday’.  So it is, but there’s something else about it too. Whether he is following the Burryman on his increasingly drunken stagger round South Queensferry covered with prickly burrs, looking at the daredevil riders on Britain’s the last Wall of Death, or mixing with the fanciers gathered for the National Poultry Show at Lanark Agricultural Centre, there is an emotional generosity to Ross’s journalism. When he meets even the most obsessional hobbyists, he’s not there to mock.

Journalism missed a trick in the Nineties, I’ve always thought, when it hared off in pursuit of celebrity rather than looking at the sheer extraordinariness of ordinary life. Ross is no slouch at the celebrity interview (his website is studded with gems: check out the one with Robbie Coltrane). But few writers are as good at holding a mirror up to life in today’s Scotland. And in a world in which newspapers matter less and less, we need people like him more than ever.

The Passion of Harry Bingo by Peter Ross is out now published by Sandstone Press priced £8.99.

---

David’s choices for ScotBookFlood

For ScotBookFlood, as my wife Joyce is Irish, a big Bernard MacLaverty fan, as we’ve been married for decades and have actually been on a (non-disruptive) midwinter break to Amsterdam, I can’t see past his novel Midwinter Break.

My neighbour Brian likes Alistair Moffat’s books almost as much as he does hiking in Scotland, so he’s getting The Hidden Ways: Scotland’s Forgotten Roads by Alistair Moffat, the ‘ways’ in question being ten wildly different (and sometimes wildly overgrown) paths that open up Scotland’s often hidden history.

In this guest post Christopher Norris, founder of the unique Jolabokaflod Book Campaign, proposes spreading the good news of Iceland’s inspiring Jolabokaflod book gifting tradition far and wide this Christmas to remind us why books are so essential to our lives.

Scotland celebrates Jolabokaflod

This seasonal Icelandic tradition is making its mark on the collective Scottish imagination, especially as First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is forging new political and cultural links between the countries. Ties between Scotland and Iceland are getting stronger with respect to issues like tourism and climate change. Jolabokaflod is helping to foster this friendship through a shared love of books and reading, with Publishing Scotland’s #ScotBookFlood campaign setting a great example as part of this year’s Book Week Scotland, run by Scottish Book Trust.

Origins of Jolabokaflod

The retail cycle each year in Iceland, from the launch of new books to the reading of these books at Christmas, is known as Jolabokaflod , which translates roughly into English as ‘Christmas book flood’.

This tradition began during World War II once Iceland had gained its full independence from Denmark in 1944. Paper was one of the few commodities not rationed during the war, so Icelanders shared their love of books even more as other types of gifts were short supply. This increase in giving books as presents reinforced Iceland’s culture as a nation of bookaholics – for example, a study conducted by Bifröst University in 2013 found that half the country’s population read at least eight books a year.

Every year since 1944, the Icelandic book trade has published a catalogue – called Bókatíðindi (‘Book Bulletin’, in English) – that is sent to every household in the country in mid-November during the Reykjavik Book Fair. People use the catalogue to order books to give friends and family for Christmas.

During the festive season, gifts are opened on 24 December and, by tradition, everyone reads the books they have been given straight away, often while drinking hot chocolate or a Christmas ale cocktail called jólabland.

As I was a pioneer of World Book Day in the UK, serving on the steering committee for the inaugural event in 1996-7, I realised that the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod offered a fabulous opportunity to promote book buying and reading within the same initiative, so the seeds of the Jolabokaflod Book Campaign were planted.

In my concurrent role as Head of Crowdfunding at CrowdPatch, I saw the opportunity to release people’s enthusiasm and creativity for running crowdfunding campaigns along Jolabokaflod principles – to buy books to give to others for active reading.

The Jolabokaflod Book Campaign at Christmas 2017

There are always moments in every household when there is a temptation to switch on the television or play a computer game. The Jolabokaflod Book Campaign encourages people to make time for family reading over the festive season and reminds everyone that reading for pleasure is fun and therapeutic.

I am encouraging Scots, and everyone else in the UK, to integrate Jólabókaflóð into the way we celebrate Christmas and – via the Book Bulletin online catalogue – to recommend the books we love.

The Jolabokaflod Book Campaign is a not-for-profit book trade and reading initiative to encourage people everywhere to buy books to give to their loved ones to read over the festive season. All profits are reinvested into our campaign projects and events.

The Book Bulletin comprises recommendations of new books and old favourites and advertising for people making the recommendations. Here is the contents page of the online publication, for you to find your way around the catalogue as recommendations are added during the Winter 2017 period.

You can see examples of how we display the book recommendations by viewing books loved by Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Campbell and Mark Zuckerberg, revealed at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2017.

If you contribute to the Book Bulletin: Winter 2017 crowdfunding campaign at CrowdPatch, you get space in the catalogue to display your book recommendations and to promote yourself and your company, organisation and projects (e.g. £10.00 buys one recommendation in the catalogue). You can purchase each book recommendation from book retailers by clicking through title-specific links.

The 2017 campaign started officially on 21 October 2017 (‘The First Day of Winter’ in the Old Nordic calendar), covers the Christmas holiday period and concludes on 14 February 2018, as St Valentine’s Day is also International Book Giving Day.

From the book trade perspective, Jolabokaflod creates a fabulous new opportunity to promote and sell books. A publisher, for example, only has to sell one book to be in profit after making a financial contribution to the Book Bulletin crowdfunding campaign, which is raising money for the Jolabokaflod 2018 programme. The Jolabokaflod Book Campaign publicises book recommendations in the catalogue via digital media, so we actively support publishers in their ambition to sell more books.

My hope for this year’s Book Bulletin campaign is to increase market awareness of the Jolabokaflod tradition. I have big plans in the pipeline for next year, including a summer version of the online catalogue and a new, members-only club with a full programme of regular events.

How you can help to spread the tradition of Jolabokaflod

Jolabokaflod is essentially a simple, viral concept – to encourage people to buy books as Christmas presents to give to friends and family for reading over the festive season. There are many ways in which you help to this Christmas tradition to spread: here are a few ideas:

• Tell friends and family about Jolabokaflod in person: word of mouth is still a potent way of sharing messages
• Include the org website URL in your email signatures
• Follow and ‘like’ Jolabokaflod on social media – Twitter: @Jolabokaflod; Facebook: /Jolabokaflod – and like and repost messages you would like to share with your networks
• Use the hashtags #Scotbookflood and #Jolabokaflod in your social media posts about books between now and Christmas
• Recommend your favourite books via the Book Bulletin crowdfunding campaign, and encourage other people to do so, too
• Read the For the Book Trade page at the Jolabokaflod website, which gives more details about the Book Bulletin campaign and how you can get involved, whether or not you work with books

Summary

Scotland and Iceland are linked via their respective literary heritages. Indeed, these cultures are recognised worldwide: Edinburgh and Reykjavík are both UNESCO Cities of Literature. Wouldn’t it be great to bind the connections between Scotland and Iceland further by spreading the good news of Jolabokaflod to families this Christmas and getting involved with Publishing Scotland’s #ScotBookFlood campaign. Let’s invite everyone in Scotland to make this wonderful tradition part of the way in which the festive season is celebrated. Let’s promote Jolabokaflod to remind everyone why books are so essential to our lives.

---

Christopher’s choices for ScotBookFlood

I plan to buy two books with a Scottish connection this Christmas, both non-fiction, and I’ll be making sure to use the #ScotBookFlood hashtag in my social media posts.

I’ll be giving my girlfriend a copy of Samuel Bostaph’s forthcoming book, Andrew Carnegie: An Economic Biography. She is a Canadian-American who runs a not-for-profit campaign to support the idea that people are more important than products. The great Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist is a fabulous example of someone she can aim to emulate.

Also, Nancy Marie Brown writes extensively about Iceland. I have my eye on her book Ivory Vikings about the history and politics behind the famous Lewis Chessmen, discovered in the Outer Hebrides in 1831. I have a friend who loved reading the 2010 Edmund de Waal’s family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, centring on his uncle’s netsuke collection. Brown’s book looks like a fascinating companion piece; I’ll be snaffling a copy myself as well, as I’m a sucker for history, especially with a Viking flavour.

---

Christopher Norris is the Founder and Curator of the Jolabokaflod Book Campaign, a not-for-profit enterprise to introduce the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod to the UK and beyond. He is also Head of Crowdfunding at CrowdPatch, the crowdfunding platform for social entrepreneurs.

The photographs from Reykjavik Book Festival in this article are by Christopher Norris.

Scottish gin is enjoyed all of the world. We invite you to travel north via this fun Scottish-Icelandic cocktail,  exclusively created for ScotBookFlood by NB Gin, which takes inspiration from Iceland’s dramatic outdoor pools.

‘I really wanted to encapsulate Iceland’s volcanic outdoor pools in this fun cocktail’.

Sundlaugarpartý (Pool Party) Cocktail

Ingredients

25ml NB Gin

12.5ml Blue Curaco

12.5ml Lemon Juice

1 Egg White

Dash of Soda

Method

Shake gin, blue curaco, lemon & Egg white. Strain to Highball Glass, no ice and Top with Soda.

Orange zest to garnish.

---

Books and Bottle Giveaway

For Book Week Scotland we’re delighted to launch a special giveaway to win a bottle of NB Gin alongside two fantastic books published by Collins – Scotland The Best by Peter Irvine and Gin: A Guide To The World’s Greatest Gins by Dominic Roskrow – and a Tartan Cloth Commonplace Notebook published by Waverley Books.

One lucky runner-up will also win a copy of Gin by Roskrow and a Tartan Cloth Commonplace Notebook published.

Read an extract from The Little Book of Gin here.

The giveaway will run from Wednesday 29th until close of day Wednesday 6th December. To enter tell us on Twitter * or by email to editor@booksfromscotland.com what Icelandic natural feature would be the inspiration for your own NB Gin cocktail. You must be over 18 to enter. Good luck!

* To enter on Twitter you must RT follow @scottishbooks, @Collins_Ref, @WaverleyBooks and @NB_Distillery.

---

Find out more about NB Gin on their website.

Thorfinn The Nicest Viking is an action-packed series by David MacPhail for young readers who love Horrid Henry and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Here David MacPhail reveals what books he’ll be gifting this Christmas, and we’ve got details of a fantastic giveaway, where 4 lucky readers can win a copy of Thorfinn The Nicest Viking And The Gruesome Games! Read on for more details…

---

Extract from Thorfinn The Nicest Viking And The Gruesome Games
By David MacPhail
Published by Floris Books

At last, they found an excellent spot: flat and sheltered and near a river.

Velda went off to collect wood, while Thorfinn rushed to set up the camp. Oswald fell flat on his back and threw his arms out, shouting, “Ohh, my poor tootsies!”

Within half an hour Thorfinn had rigged up a large tent, made a fire and built a roasting spit, from which he hung a kettle.

They sat warming their feet by the fire and drinking tea. Percy flew down and perched on Thorfinn’s shoulder.

“Ahh! What an excellent holiday this is,” said Thorfinn.

“It is NOT a hol—” Velda began then sighed. “Oh, what’s the point?”

Suddenly, their definitely-NOT-a-holiday was interrupted by a WHOOSH of air past their ears. An arrow embedded itself into a nearby tree:

Percy squawked and took to the air just as a group of fierce-looking men emerged from the bushes. They had long braided hair, thick beards, and wore reddish-coloured tartan kilts. One of them was pointing a bow and arrow at Thorfinn and his friends.

The man at the front was huge and muscly with a thick mane of red hair.

“I am Ranald MacRanald, chieftain of Clan MacRanald, otherwise known as The Red Wolf. Who are you?” he growled.

Oswald spoke first, jabbing a finger at the man with the bow. “You could have had my eye out with that thing, young man!”

“Fire another one at the auld codger!” said Ranald.

The bowman let loose a second arrow, which parted Oswald’s hair.

“OHH, you’re going to be sorry you did that,” said Velda. “SOOO sorry.” She whipped out her axe.

“Oh yes, little girl,” said Ranald, knocking the axe from her hands with his huge sword. “And why’s that?”

Velda stood her ground. “We’re Vikings, and you don’t mess with us.”

“Vikings!” The men chattered excitedly. “Actual Vikings! We’ve captured real Vikings!”

“In fact, this boy is the son of our chief Harald the Skull-Splitter. You’ve probably heard of him.”

There was more excited chatter among the clansmen:

“Oh aye, he’s quite famous!”

“He’s one of my favourites, he is!”

“We’ve captured the Skull-Splitter’s son!”

Ranald turned to his men and rubbed his hands.

See, I told you, we can be at least as tough as the Vikings. At least!”

Thorfinn stepped in front of Ranald and took off his helmet. “Now that we’re all acquainted, could I offer you and your men a cup of tea?”

The Scots stared at Thorfinn’s kettle like it was a rat sandwich.

“Tea?” said one of them. “Is that what Vikings drink?”

“Is that their secret? Does it make you tougher?” asked another.

“Should we be drinking tea?”

“Don’t be daft! He’s playing with us. Vikings don’t drink tea,” said Ranald. “I have a plan. We’ll take them back to the castle and ransom them.”

Two men grabbed Velda. She kicked, and screamed at them. “Oh, you’re going to be SOOOO sorry! When Harald finds us, he’ll chop you into little bits! He’ll mince you and stick you in a curry!”

Thorfinn, on the other hand, was brimming with excitement as they dragged him away. “Oh, a castle! I love castles. Sadly most of the castles I see get burnt to the ground. I’d rather like to see one that wasn’t.”

“Wheesht!” cried Ranald. “Shooglin’ numpties! You’re prisoners; you’re supposed to be quiet.”

Ranald’s men pushed their three captives into the forest while Percy followed overhead. They walked about fifty metres before Oswald started complaining about his feet again, then another fifty before he demanded to be carried.

Ranald sighed. “Silly old fool!” He prodded one of his men. “Winkie! Carry him!”

If anything, Winkie was even older, scrawnier and more decrepit than Oswald.

“Whit? I’m no’ carrying him!” the man protested.

“Shuddup and get on with it!”

Winkie was a good name for this old fossil. He had a gurney, screwed-up face and blinkie eyes.

He staggered and gasped as Oswald leapt onto his back. “You’re a ton weight, auld man!”

“Rubbish! I live on a diet of raw cabbage and apples.” To make his point, Oswald let loose a colossal FART. “See?”

---

Thorfinn The Nicest Viking – A Gruesome Giveaway!

In collaboration with Floris Books, we’re running a fantastic giveaway where 4 lucky readers can win a copy of Thorfinn The Nicest Viking And The Gruesome Games! All you need to do is answer the following question:

Which of these gruesome games would you be champion of and why?

Bear Staring
Hammer Tossing
Horse Vaulting
Pie Clobbering

Enter via our poll on Twitter (@scottishbooks) launching on the afternoon of Monday 27th November or by emailing editor@booksfromscotland.com with your answer. The deadline is 2pm on Monday 4th December. Good luck!

---

David MacPhail’s ScotBookFlood Recommendations

David MacPhail left home at eighteen to travel the world and have adventures. After working as a chicken wrangler, a ghost-tour guide and a waiter on a tropical island, he now has the sensible job of writing about yetis, Vikings and ghostly detectives. At home in Perthshire, Scotland, he exists on a diet of cream buns and zombie movies. David is also the author of Yeti on the Loose and the Thorfinn the Nicest Viking series and Top-Secret Grandad and Me: Death by Tumble Dryer. Here he reveals his ScotBookFlood picks…

No child could fail to be engrossed by An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Mythical Creatures by Theresa Breslin and Kate Leiper. Treasury is absolutely the right word here – with lively, engaging text and beautiful illustrations, it really is a keepsake, one that will remain a favourite on a child’s bookshelf for many years.

My second choice is Silver Skin, by the estimable Joan Lennon. Set in stone age Orkney, it’s a fabulous blend of science fiction and history, two of my favourite genres. My nephew, who is 13, will love it.

In this candid article, poet, writer and performer Brian Johnstone discusses the revelations and resolutions in his memoir Double Exposure.

‘Show us a carpet and we would sweep our worries under it’ I say, early on in my memoir Double Exposure. Like so many others born and brought up in the ‘let’s get back to normal’ atmosphere of post-war Britain, nothing was ever discussed. Disagreements were not to be countenanced. Any such attempt was dismissed as ‘arguing the toss’. No – doubts and worries were things to get over, to put aside. Normality, however staid, was paramount.

Our family was a secure unit – two parents, two children – no more. Life in middle class, mid-century, suburban Edinburgh was as it should be – father out at work; mother looking after the home. Why would I have questioned that? Why would I have expected anything but that bland normality? After all, it gave me something to rebel against as a fractious teenager. Something to look down on, even despise, in that self-righteous manner of the know-it-all youth.

But by twenty-five I’d got over that. Married and settled in a job myself, I had begun hesitantly to think there might be a point to my parents’ stance. But, unbeknownst to me, that was about to be challenged. The rug, under which so much had been swept, was about to be pulled from under my feet. Six months after my father’s early death, the first revelation appeared. We were not alone. There was more to our family than I had been led to believe. One more, in fact.

In the memoir I describe this as feeling like a game of musical chairs. We all had ‘to move round the family circle and sit down again, but in a different place from the one we’d been in before’. That never-discussed period in my father’s life – the war – had produced a daughter – my half-sister – and a first wife, into the bargain.

This was something to assimilate, to take on board if I could. That the situation had been concealed caused a lot of initial resentment. But my mother was able to fill in the back story and, although we struggled to understand why we had been kept in the dark, my brother and I eventually came to terms with the situation. After a lot of heart searching, we accepted it. Contact was made and the family demographic was sketched anew.

There is a time-lapse to this story. One in which visits were made, letters were exchanged and relationships were hesitantly shaped. But it was not until over twenty years later that the next piece in the puzzle fell into place. In a strange instance of symmetry, this was six months after another death – my mother’s this time.

But it was the same thing. A strange recurrence of the previous revelation. Another family member hove into view over the time horizon. Another hidden wartime episode was suddenly out in the open. Once again the family unit had to be resized, recalibrated – but this time there seemed to be no-one there who could fill in the details.

While the first revelation, twenty years before, had produced surprise and resentment, this one produced a much more profound sense of shock and bewilderment. Even getting back in touch with an aged second cousin, who had carried this secret for some fifty years, did little to allay my feelings.

It was these emotions that drove me back to my childhood, seemingly so staid and conventional. As a poet, naturally I turned to that form to explore and express all that the two revelations induced. Over a further time lapse – now also twenty years in duration – the muse took me through the ‘incidents and accidents’ of my younger years. Poems about childhood memories, family members, early friends. All were written, many were published in my various collections – but I still felt I had more to say.

Gradually it dawned on me that what I had in these poems was a sort of storyboard, a path through the confusion that rejigging the family circle had caused. And it was a unique story, as far as I could see. All similar memoirs – at least the ones I had read – were written from the point of view of those actively seeking lost relatives. The story that I had to tell was from the point of view of someone to whose family tree new and unknown members had been peremptorily added. I had to turn to prose. And the memoir was born.

I wrote Double Exposure over a period of some five years, researching as I went the social mores and accepted values of the time of my upbringing. It took me down paths I had never fully explored: the rich texture of city life in the 1950s; schooldays and holidays and Sundays; attitudes to unconventional behaviour; life in a more homogenous society; the nature of memory itself. Much in the story is resolved; some is unresolved. But the writing of it has resolved much in my own mind.

By a winding and often torturous trail, I have come to understand the motivation behind all the sweeping-under-the-carpet that went on. And others have too. And consequently we understand each other the better.

I wish the reader well if they choose to venture down this trail. It is one which underlines how different the past was – even the not-so-distant past. It is very much that different country the saying exemplifies. As I say in the book, ‘the current climate of openness is preferable to the reticence, obfuscation and denial’ that characterised the times my parents lived through.

But what I also say is that I hold nothing against them on this account. They were products of their time and background. Who am I to suggest they should – even could – have been otherwise?

---

Double Exposure by Brian Johnstone is out now published by Saraband priced £9.99.